I’m back to talk more about sleep. Here is my post from yesterday in which I did talk about sleep and what I was planning to do (for once! I kind of stuck to the topic). I ended by saying I was planning on staying up for 48 hours, and the minute I typed that, I was so exhausted. I mean, I’m fatigued all the time, but there are spurts of extreme tiredness that lasts a day or two.
There are two ways I can go with this. One is to try the 48 hours staying up and no sleeping route. That is a very hard route. Going down that path would be me trying to keep adding to it and reaching 72 hours. That would be pretty difficult, but I think I could do the 48 hours. Maybe not right now because I’m so tired, but at some point.
The other route is just to sleep whenever I’m about to fall over without regard as to what time it is, which would be easier. I sometimes fall asleep in my chair at my computer, and then I do this weird (and aggravating) thing of sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, and repeat.
I’ve also had it where I was watching a video on my laptop (lying on my couch), and I would have to repeat the same section several times because I kept falling asleep in ten-minute chunks. I was too stubborn to actually take a nap, though, because…my brain is broke? I joke, but not really. I would not say my brain is broken, but I would say that’s the way my brain works.
It’s so frustrating. I’m trying to accept that it’s not me being stubborn or a contrarian. It’s not me deliberately sabotaging myself. It’s how my brain works. That’s not to say that I have to just throw up my hands and say there’s nothing I can do about it, but I do think it would help if I didn’t view it as me being deliberately ‘bad’.
It’s difficult because that’s how I was viewed in my family–and how that kind of behavior is viewed by society in general. There is a narrow range of behavior that is considered acceptable, and woe be to the people who strayed too far outside those lines. These days, there seemed to be a little more tolerance of some divergence, but not much. It’s still a very narrow band of what kind of oddness is acceptable, and it’s rarely much.
I have mentioned the double empathy problem before, which is that it’s hard when autistic people and allistic non-autistic) people talk because of the very different mindset. Usually, it’s up to the autistic person to adapt and try to be ‘normal’ in order to fit into society. And if the autistic person doesn’t mask enough, they are excoriated for being weird, not trying, being rebellious, etc.
It’s hard for allistic people to understand autistic people just as it’s hard for allistic people to understand autistic people (I’m talking very broadly, of course). The difference is that autistic people have to understand allistic people to some extent to survive in society while the opposite is not true. Let me rephrase: autistic people have to know how the allistic world works, even if it’s unfathomable.
For example. I know that when I interact in polite society, I have to follow the small talk script. “Hi! How are you/how’s it going? _______ (insert generic comment about weather), etc.” I also know that I’m supposed to answer with very general responsses and not go into detail.
By the way, I was reading Ask A Manager (my stories), and there was a question about an employee who refused to answer the customers’ questions properly (this was how the Letter Writer laid it out). Every answer he gave was tangential to the question they asked. So if they asked if a cup was dishwasher safe, he would say, “It’s safe at 175 degrees.” Which was not the question they asked, nor did it make sense in context. The LW had been working with him for nearly five years to be a better customer service representative to no avail.
The majority of the comments said that he was doing it on purpose–that he was being willfully and maliciously obtuse. I thought it was possible he was being malicious/willful, yes, but that didn’t sit completely right with me. A few people suggested that he might be neurodiverse by talking about their spouses being like that. They could ask a direct question and get what they perceived to be a runaround. They mentioned that said spouses were neurodivergent, and it clicked in my brain. Because, see, I do that, too. I liek to say I’ve never met a question I couldn’t dance around., and we all know that I like to go down side paths like they were the main story quest.
One thing my brain tells me is that I must give precise answers–which is why I rarely give just yes or no answers. There is just so much context needed when answering any question. This is why I was the worst at multiple choice tests back when I was in school. I could come up with a situation where several if not all of the answers would work. This was in psychology, by the way. Not trig or chemistry or something more concrete like that. yes, there are some concrete areas in psychology, but there is also more room for varying circumstances.
My Intro to Psych teacher wrote the worst multiple choice tests, and she graded on a bell curve. That meant that if you got more than a few wrong, you could not get an A. And, yes, I was very much into getting straight As in college. I will forever be bitter that I got a B in my first psych class (my major), which permanently wrecked my GPA. The problem was that I could see each answer being the right answer, depending upon the circumstance. I argued about it with my teacher, and she told me that I wvas right, but she wasn’t going to give me credit for my answers.
That was the worst thing she could have said to someonne with my brain because I could not make those two statements fit together. She was saying I was right, so I should get credit! If I wasn’t getting credit, then she should tell me that I got it wrong! My brain just could not reconcile “you’re right” with “I’m not giving you credit.” Because that’s how my brain is. It has to be one or the other; it cannot be both.
Side note: I have a weird-ass brain (in many ways, yes, but in this specific case) in that it’s incredibly rigid in some ways while being almost too porous in others. If I don’t have any strong conviction about something, I can be given all sorts of information, which I will greedily ingest. As long as I’m interested in the subject, that is. If I’m not, then forget it. I won’t take in a damn thing.
More tomorrow.